How the Bibliography Is Organized

The publications are listed chronologically under five categories by the date they were first published:

Books (currently 50 listed)

Articles (currently 237 listed)

Reviews (currently 112 listed)

Lyrics

Edited Series

Some of the books and articles are linked to Amazon.com, and others are linked to PDFs available for free on TGC site. Further, most of the articles and reviews are also linked to PDFs.

Note: (1) The PDFs may not be uploaded to other sites without written permission from the copyright holders. (2) I plan to continue updating the bibliography, so please let me know if you spot any errors such as typos or omissions.

Benefits of the Carson PDFs hosted by TGC

Number: The bibliography of Carson’s publications currently links to about 350 PDFs hosted on TGC site. The vast majority of them have not been available online previously.

Price: All the PDFs are free. (A few dozen of them were previously sold for $0.99 each at ChristWay Media.) This includes over 300 articles and reviews as well as the following nine books:

Format: The PDFs preserve exact pagination, which is valuable for citations. Also, I’ve systematically formatted each PDF by cropping, enabling OCR (i.e., so one can search them, copy and paste, etc.), and making other general improvements (whiting out advertisements in magazine articles, whiting out other books reviews from journals, whiting out printing smudges, etc.).

Convenience: Never before have so many PDFs of Carson’s publications been available online at a single website, and no user name or password is needed to download them. I would suggest using a tool such as the Firefox extension “DownThemAll!” to download all the PDFs most efficiently (i.e., by selecting to download all items on the webpage with a .pdf extension).

Labels: The PDFs are uniformly tagged (e.g., title, topic, date), and the format of the names of the PDFs themselves are also consistent (e.g., “2009_scholar_as_pastor.pdf″).

Content: When it comes to evaluating the content of Carson’s publications, I’m probably not as objective as others would be since I’m his full-time research assistant and he’s my doctoral mentor, but I don’t think it’s hagiographic to say that Carson is one of the finest NT scholars alive. When I arrived at Trinity in summer 2006, Willem VanGemeren, the director of the PhD program for theological studies at TEDS, advised me to get to know the professor whom I would like to be my mentor for the PhD program. One important way to do that, he suggested, is to read that professor’s works and become very familiar with them. So I did. It took a long time, but not a moment of that was wasted. I’d highly recommend that you redeem the time by systematically reading Carson’s books, articles, and reviews. They’re articulate, informed, thoughtful, engaging, and edifying. He exalts Christ by exegeting his words, tracing themes through the Bible’s salvation-historical storyline, addressing hot topics with clarity and nuance, and engaging and confronting bad theology as well as the culture.

Discouraged or Grateful to God?

Some people, especially pastors and professors, may look at the list of Carson’s publications and be tempted to get discouraged. “How can one man do all that? I’m such a failure.” If that’s how you’re tempted to feel, let me encourage you by sharing an insight I learned from Peter T. O’Brien, one of Carson’s best friends. When O’Brien was at TEDS in September 2006 to teach a block course, he shared his narrative with a group of PhD students, and I’ve not forgotten his valuable counsel that led me to this conclusion: by God’s grace I will serve him with the gifts he has given me and not feel inferior for the childish reason that I am not as gifted as someone else; rather, I will thank God for gracing me with gifts to the church like D. A. Carson.

Dr. Carson’s sheer productivity is nothing less than astonishing. One could become tired just working through the latest numbers: he has written 50 books; 235 articles; 112 book reviews; and 46 edited books in the various series he edits. Average it out and it comes to about one book written or edited every four months, with one article and two reviews written every six weeks—for three decades.

Thanks for your work in making these available, and also for your Peter O’Brien anecdote. It’s a good reminder to press on for the glory of God using fully (and contentedly) whatever gifts and opportunities God grants you. “Parallelomania” unfortunately does not confine itself to the study of ancient texts. Thanks for the reminder!

What an incredible resource! Thank you for your diligence on this and the word of encouragement at the end. Thank you for your part in making such resources available to the rest of the body of Christ and to me personally. I am trying to read and listen to as much Carson as I can. Thank you! Hope your family is doing well!

Vol 1 For Love of God – downloads, doesnt open in Preview on Mac, but will open in Adobe Reader. However when I try to open it in Acrobat Professional 6 it gives the warning “There was an error opening this document. Bad encrypt dictionary”

It might need opened and resaved in a higher version of Professional or whatever created it.

Thank you for this resource page! I have always dipped my toes into a few of his writings but never anything substantial. With this resource page of 200+ articles alone it is amazing . . . even the ones from the 70’s are still relevant for today’s studies. I am looking forward to downloading them all. :) Might take a while though . . . LOL

Andy, Many thanks for these links, especially the free PDFs! I too have found Dr Carson’s ministry very helpful and am looking forward to his visit to Word Alive in UK later this year. I noticed Desiring God is hosting a free PDF of his joint publication with John Piper too? Thanks Allan

[…] promoted, For the Love of God, (vol 1) can now be downloaded for free, thanks to an old friend, Andy Naselli, who is compiling some of D.A. Carson’s works and making them available online. I still […]

[…] and research assistant for D A (Don) Carson, one of the foremost evangelical NT scholars alive. Andy has done everyone a tremendous service by collecting and organizing a bunch of Carson resources available for free at The Gospel Coalition […]

[…] –D. A. Carson, For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word (vol. 2; Wheaton: Crossway, 1999), entry for February 17. (This book is available for free as a PDF from TGC.) […]